Dr Kev. - Kam Servicing Network.

Hello Again!

I had a great day on Saturday. Having arranged time off from the workshop, I was able to go and see my lad – Josh – play in a charity football match. How much better can a father’s Saturday get? As you’d expect, Josh played a blinder, excelling even what I thought he was capable of. Fantastic.

After the game, it was time for some father-son bonding, so off to Skeggy beach we went. By the time we got there, the clouds had arrived and so had the rains. Typical! No beach footy for us then… And of course, the afternoon was completed by watching the FA Cup Final – now that is what I call a perfect Saturday!

There’s much excitement throughout Kam at the moment, as we’re in the process of building a brand new website. It’s all a little hush-hush – in fact I’ll probably take a rapping for letting the feline this far out of the bag – but I just had to tell someone. More details will arrive as soon as I’m allowed to spill the beans, so for the moment, keep it just between you and I, OK?

All restful weekends must come to an end, and as usual, this one did on Monday morning. Mr Sawston (name changed to protect his innocence) had left his D-reg Land Rover with us for some minor remedial work to the rear lights, as well as having an electric towbar hook-up installed. A fairly straight-forward job, I thought, so budgeted about two to three hours from start to finish.

Six and a half hours later, I was still at it. Within twenty minutes of starting the job, it had become apparent that the situation was really rather critical. You see, Mr Sawston had noticed that the rear lights were flickering on and off as he drove along, so assumed that he had a loose wire somewhere in the system. This assumption was deemed to be largely correct by all and sundry – including myself – until the moment that I undid the first screw holding the rear light cluster in. As I delicately rotated the screw in its hole, a quantity of rust flakes spewed forth (and fifth, and sixth for that matter – they just kept on coming) as did a small amount of water that had obviously been sitting somewhere inside the bodywork. As you can imagine, my heart sank.

Once the cluster cover was removed, the state of things became apparent. Water had obviously made its way through the outer casing and had sat on top of the wires, causing them to decay. As I looked at some of them, they crumbled into dust and swirled off in the gust that emanated from Glynn’s latest 'walk-past', during which he uttered something particularly useful.

“That looks nasty. It’ll be quite a job.” Thanks Glynn – spot on as always…
Obviously I had to call Mr Sawston to appraise him of the situation.

“To be honest,” I said, trying to put a brave face on things, “it is all repairable. But I don’t quite know how long it is going to take. The wires might only need tracing back a little way, or perhaps I’m going to have to go all the way to the fuse box to put things right. At the moment I just can’t tell, and so can’t really tell you how long it is going to take.”

“Oh” was the best Mr Sawston could manage. “What caused all this to go wrong?”

“Probably just age, Mr Sawston. A crack in the light casing would be all that was needed to let water in. It’s amazing how much water can get in through a tiny gap – especially in the recent rains.”

“Well, Kev, I really want you to get the car back to perfect condition. I’ve had it since new and it is probably the best Landy I’ve ever owned. You’ve really got no idea how long it might take?”

I thought hard, but couldn’t come up with a time figure as I really didn’t know the extent of the damage. “I could give you an estimate, but it would only be very rough. Somewhere around eight hours possibly, maybe more, maybe less. What I can do for you Mr Sawston, to help you out, is to chop our labour rate in half for the job.”

“That would be great Kev, thank you, I really appreciate that.”

So it was back to work, tracing the wires back through the body work to find a portion that wasn’t corroded so that I could patch new lengths in. If you’ve ever had to track wires back through a Land Rover, you’ll know that it isn’t the easiest job in the world – but eventually I had everything in perfect order (a predictable end to the tale, I hear you cry). Ironically, it was actually easier to install the towbar hook-up while I was rewiring the rest of the lighting system than it would have been to just attach it to the original wiring loom. So there is a silver lining on every cloud…

So far this week, I’ve already had another three broken timing belts arrive in the workshop, all of which required extensive rebuilds. Will motorists ever learn, I wonder (not you, regular reader, I know that you know how important it is to have your belt replaced…)? It has also been a good week for Stunner tyres – a set of which we fitted to Mr Sawston’s Land Rover a year ago incidentally. So while the 4x4 was having all the wiring work done, I checked the tyres – and even on this 4x4 they are still going strong after a year. From sports cars to 4x4s and all points in between, I’m still being amazed just how durable Stunners are…

That’s the end of another tale for this week. Until the next time, look after the car that carries you!

Dr Kev Allen